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| -by Crack |
Is it irony or just a really bad sign that the very day I send out a significant check against my graduate student loans, I also get perhaps the most mind-bogglingly stupid piece of mail I have ever received from my undergraduate alma mater? I try not to compare one institution to the other, but any time I hear people considering my "Bachelor's pad", I implore them to consider some other quality educational option, like clown college. This particular university mailing illustrated precisely why I'd hate for people to discover I attended this prestigious institution because it would confirm that I actually paid good money to go there.1
I opened the envelope; it was a form asking me to check the information they have on file and correct any mistakes I might find. I start to do what I always do: skim it over briefly and then chuck it in the bin... but this time something caught my eye and forced me to take a better look. Stunned, I kept reading. Almost without thinking, I picked up a pen and began to cross things out, circling them, writing in the margins; then I started scrawling "NO" in big letters (with arrows!), and then I began to laugh. I called one of my best friends from college and read it aloud. We both started laughing; whether out of humor or embarrassment, it was tough to guess.
It began well: my name, address, phone number, birth date and gender were correct, but the rest was a litany of gross misinformation born either of inspired chance or cruel design. Under marital status, I had supposedly been a busy bee as every box was checked: Single, Married, Divorced, Separated & Widowed. The same was true for my racial identity: I claimed to be an American Indian Asian Pacific Foreign Black American Hispanic White American Other. Seeing my obvious diversity, it's amazing how I hadn't qualified for scholarship. Oh wait, I did! Every box in the Financial Aid category was checked: my education was apparently buoyed by Loans, a Scholarship, Work/Study, and a Fellowship. No wonder I'm in debt! I was a member of three different sororities and my sport was Letterman-Tennis.2 I also went to Harvard Medical School (with a degree in "1996" in the Year "[blank]") which is also, evidently, where I work, although I am Retired and the Harvard address included the People's Republic of China. I figure I must be between jobs or languishing my golden years in the East. Time flies when you're having chow fun!
The kicker for me was reading about my Spouse and Children. While I do have a spouse and child (1), my husband was not [Nameless] born in 1952 and we do not have four (4) kids: Franco Guglielmo, Daniel April, Mark Jovcevski nor Eric Jovcevski. Plus the particular fear that these darling dependents' birthdays span from 1965 to 1979, and I was born in 1971. I circled my own birth date (which, remember, was correct) and drew arrows to these dates to point out that I wasn't even born yet, or at least hadn't left elementary school, to raise my four miracle babies. (My friend correctly pointed out that, given I had been Single, Married, Divorced, Separated & Widowed, this could have been a second marriage with grown children from a previous marriage; husband #1 having either been my divorce or kicked the bucket. Granted, I might be able to give them that.) I was pleased to see that Franco and Daniel had received a Business Degree and a Graduate Business Degree, respectively. I had obviously been a good influence on them. I wondered what Mark and Eric were up to since they hadn't called home in such a long time and wondered if they ever managed to correctly pronounce "Guglielmo" and stop calling him "Mo."
My occupation is in Education, I am the owner/president of a company, and I received my Bachelor's Degrees in English Literature and Anthropology. These are actually true; quite the background for re-married medical retiree working for Harvard in China at the ripe old age of 33. After trying to correct all this stuff and making the poor page resemble nothing so much as my baby's attempts at penmanship3, I finally drew a little box and wrote: This is quite possibly the stupidest piece of mail I have ever received. It makes me embarrassed to have gone to [name of guilty institution edited here]. I shudder to think that this is where our hard-earned money went.
Under advisement, I have postponed mailing this form back (No Postage Necessary) and agreed to photocopy it for posterity4 and even request a clean copy to hang in a frame in my office. It shows a remarkable life of achievement...even if it's not mine.
